Hate List

by Jennifer Brown

  Most kids came to Mrs. Tate to either complain about a teacher or look through a college catalogue, and that was pretty much it. If Mrs. Tate had gone to college hoping to counsel scads of troubled teenagers, she was probably pretty disappointed. If there can be such a thing as disappointment about not having enough troubled people in your life.

  She motioned for me to sit in a chair with a torn vinyl seat and she edged herself around a small file cabinet and sat in the chair behind her desk, dwarfed by stacks of papers and Post-it notes in front of her. She leaned forward over the mess and folded her hands right in the middle of an old fast food wrapper.

  “I was watching for you this morning,” she said. “I’m glad you came back to school. Shows guts.”

  “I’m giving it a try,” I mumbled, rubbing my thigh absently. “I can’t make any promises I’ll stay.” Eighty-three and counting, I repeated in my head.

  “Well, I hope you do. You’re a good student,” she said. “Ah!” she yelped, holding up one finger. She leaned to the side and pulled open a drawer of the file cabinet next to her desk. A framed photo of a black and white cat pawing at something wobbled as the drawer moved and I imagined her, several times a day, having to right the photo after it fell. She pulled a brown file folder out and opened it on the desk in front of her, leaving the file drawer hanging ajar. “That reminds me. College. Yes. You were considering…” she flipped through a few pages, “… Kansas State, if I remember correctly.” She kept flipping, then ran her finger down a page and said, “Yep. Right here. Kansas State and Northwest Missouri State.” She closed the folder and smiled. “I got the program requirements from each of them just last week. It’s a little late to be just starting this process, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Well, you’ll probably have to account for some things on your permanent record, but… really… you were never charged with… well, you know what I mean.”

  I nodded. I knew what she meant. Not that it needed to be on my permanent record, because I pretty much couldn’t think of anyone in the country who hadn’t heard of me by now. I was like best friends with the world. Or maybe worst enemies. “I changed my mind,” I said.

  “Oh. A different school? Shouldn’t be a problem. With your grades…”

  “No, I mean I’m not going. To college.”

  Mrs. Tate leaned forward, resting her hand on the wrapper again. She was frowning at me. “Not going?”

  “Right. I don’t want to anymore.”

  She spoke softly: “Listen, Valerie. I know you blame yourself for what happened. I know you think you’re just like him. But you’re not.”

  I sat up straighter and tried to smile confidently. This was not a conversation I wanted to get into today, of all days. “Really, Mrs. Tate, you don’t have to say this,” I said. I touched my back pocket with the picture of Nick and me at Blue Lake in it for reassurance. “I mean, I’m okay and everything.”

  Mrs. Tate held up a hand and looked me straight in the eye. “I spent more time with Nick than with my own son most days,” she said. “He was such a searcher. Always so angry. He was one of those kids who was just going to struggle through life. He was so consumed with hate. Ruled by it, really.”

  No, I wanted to shout at her. No he wasn’t. Nick was good. I saw it.

  I was struck with a memory of the night Nick had shown up at my house unexpectedly just as Mom and Dad began to rev up for their usual after-dinner bitchfest. I could feel it coming: Mom slamming plates into the dishwasher, mumbling under her breath, and Dad pacing the floor between the living room and the kitchen, eyeing Mom and shaking his head. The tension was building and I’d begun to get that tired feeling I’d had so often lately, wishing I could just go to bed and wake up in a different house, a different life. Frankie had already disappeared into his room and I wondered if he got that tired feeling, too.

  I was just climbing the stairs to my bedroom when the doorbell rang. I could see Nick through the window next to the door, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  “I’ll get it!” I hollered to my parents as I ran back down the stairs, but the argument had already started and they didn’t notice.

  “Hey,” I’d said, stepping out on the front porch. “What’s up?”

  “Hey,” he said back. He’d held out a CD. “I brought this,” he said. “I burned it for you this afternoon. It’s all the songs that make me think about you.”

  “That’s so sweet,” I said, reading the back of the case, where he’d carefully typed all of the titles and artists of the songs. “I love it.”

  On the other side of the door, we could hear Dad’s voice getting closer. “You know, maybe I won’t come home, Jenny, that’s a great idea,” he was growling. Nick looked at the door, and I could swear I saw embarrassment creep through his face. And something else. Pity, maybe? Fear? Maybe that same weariness I felt?

  “Want to get out of here?” he asked, shoving his hands in his pockets. “It doesn’t sound too good in there. We can hang together for a while.”

  I nodded, opening the door a crack and dropping the CD on the table in the foyer. Nick reached out and grabbed my hand, leading me to the field behind my house. We found a clearing and sprawled on our backs in the grass, looking at the stars, talking about… anything, everything.

  “You know why we get along so well, Val?” he asked after a while. “Because we think just alike. It’s like we have the same brain. It’s cool.”

  I stretched, wrapping my leg around his. “Totally,” I said. “Screw our parents. Screw their stupid fights. Screw everybody. Who gives a shit about them?”

  “Not me,” he said. He scratched his shoulder. “For a long time I thought nobody would ever get me, but you really do.”

  “Of course I do.” I turned my head and kissed his shoulder. “And you get me, too. It’s kind of creepy the way we’re so alike.”

  “Creepy in a good way.”

  “Yeah, in a good way.”

  He turned to face me, propping himself up on an elbow. “It’s good that we have each other,” he said. “It’s like, you know, even if the whole world hates you, you still have someone to rely on. Just the two of you against the whole world. Just us.”

  At the time, my thoughts had been so consumed with Mom and Dad and their incessant arguing, I’d just assumed we were talking about them. Nick knew exactly what I was going through—he called his stepdad Charles his “Step du Jour” and talked about his mom’s ever-changing love life as if it were some big joke. I’d had no idea he might have meant us against… everyone. “Yeah. Just us,” I’d answered. “Just us.”

  I looked at the carpet of Mrs. Tate’s office, once again struck with the feeling that I never knew Nick at all. That all of that soul-mate stuff we’d talked about was just bullshit. That when it comes to reading people, I’m an F student.

  I felt a lump in my throat. How indulgent was that? The school outcast cries over the memory of her boyfriend, the murderer. Even I would hate me. I swallowed and forced the lump to go down.

  Mrs. Tate had sat back in her chair, but was still talking. “Valerie, you had a future. You were choosing colleges. You were getting good grades. Nick never had a future. Nick’s future was… this.”

  A tear spilled over. I swallowed and swallowed but it did no good. How did she know about Nick’s future? You can’t predict the future. God, if I could have predicted what happened, I would’ve stopped it. I would’ve made it go away. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. And I should have. That’s what gets me. I should have. And now my future doesn’t have college in it. My future is about being known around the world as The Girl Who Hates Everyone. That’s what the newspapers called me—The Girl Who Hates Everyone.

  I wanted to tell Tate all of these things. But it was all so complicated, and thinking about it made my leg throb and my heart ache. I stood up and shrugged into my backpack. I wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “I better get to class,” I said. “I don’t want to be late on the first day. I’ll think ab
out it. College, I mean. But like I said, I can’t make any promises, okay?”

  Mrs. Tate sighed and stood up. She pushed the file drawer in, but didn’t move around the file cabinet.

  “Valerie,” she said, then stopped and seemed to reconsider. “Try to have a good day, okay? I am glad you’re back. And I’ll hang onto those program requirements for you.”

  I started toward the door. But just before I reached for the doorknob, I turned.

  “Mrs. Tate? Have things changed much?” I asked. “I mean, are people different now?” I didn’t know what I hoped her answer would be. Yes, everyone learned their lesson and now we’re all one big, happy family, just like they say we are in the newspapers. Or no, there were no bullies—it was all in your head just like they say. Nick was crazy and you bought it and that’s all there was to it. You were angry for no reason. So angry, but it was all in your imagination.

  Mrs. Tate chewed on her bottom lip and seemed to really consider the question. “People are people,” she finally said, turning up her palms in a helpless, sad shrug.

  I think that was the last answer I wanted to hear.

  MAY 2, 2008

  7:10 A.M.

  “She might cast a spell on you, Christy…”

  Most days I found it totally ironic that Mom drove Frankie to school because he hated to ride the bus while I rode the bus because I hated the excruciating car ride with Mom. But some days I wished I’d gone ahead and braved Mom’s morning critiques because the bus was just such crap.

  Usually I could crawl into a seat somewhere in the middle, sink down into a C-shape, my knees propped against the seat in front of me, listen to my MP3 player, and completely disappear.

  But lately Christy Bruter had been a real pain. It’s not like that was news, since I couldn’t stand Christy anyway. Never could.

  Christy was one of those girls who was popular because most everyone was afraid not to be her friend. She was big and bulky and had a gut that stood out belligerently in front of her and thighs that were enormous and could crack a skull. Which was weird because she was the captain of the softball team. I never could figure that one out. I just couldn’t imagine Christy Bruter outrunning anyone to first base. But she must have done it at least once or twice, I guess. Or maybe the coach was too afraid to cut her. Who knows?

  I’d known Christy since at least kindergarten and never once had I thought I might like her. And vice versa. Every Back to School Night, my mom would pull the teacher aside and advise her that Christy and I should never sit at the same table group together. “We all have that one person…” Mom would say to the teacher with an apologetic smile. Christy Bruter was my one person.

  In elementary school Christy called me Bucky Beaver. In sixth grade she started a rumor that I wore a thong, which, in middle school, was a huge deal. And in high school she decided she didn’t like my makeup and clothes and so started the nickname Sister Death that everyone thought was hilarious.

  She got on two stops after me, which could work in my favor on most days because I had time to get invisible before she got on the bus. Not that I was afraid of her or anything; I just got sick of dealing with her.

  I sank into my seat, slid down where my head was barely peeking over the top of the backrest, and stuffed my earbuds into my ears, turning up the volume on my MP3 player with my thumb. I peered out the window, thinking that it would feel good to hold Nick’s hand today. I could hardly wait to get to school and see him. I couldn’t wait to smell the cinnamon gum on his breath and fold my head into the curl of his arm during lunch, sit shielded by him, all the rest of the world shut out. Christy Bruter. Jeremy. Mom and Dad and their “discussions” that always, always, always turned into screaming matches and ended with Dad slithering out of the house into a pocket of darkness, Mom sniffling pathetically in her room.

  The bus slid to a stop, and then to another. I kept my eyes glued to the window, looking out at a terrier nosing through a trash bag in front of a house. The terrier’s tail was beating the wind and his head was all but completely covered by trash bag. I wondered how he could breathe and tried to think of the things he might have found in there that would get him so excited.

  The bus got going again and I turned up my MP3 player as the noise ratcheted up exponentially with the number of kids that got on. I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.

  I felt a bump against my arm. I figured it was somebody walking past and ignored it. Then I felt a harder one and someone used the cord to snatch the earbud out of my right ear. It dangled in midair, tinny music spilling out of it.

  “What the hell?” I said, pulling the bud out of my left ear and rewinding the cord around the MP3 player. I looked to my right and there was Christy Bruter’s face grinning on the other side of the aisle. “Go away, Christy.”

  Her ugly friend Ellen (the equally Amazonian, red-haired, man-faced Garvin varsity softball team catcher) laughed, but Christy just stared at me with this fake innocent bat of her eyes.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sister Death. Maybe you’re having a hallucination. Maybe you got some bad X or something. Maybe the devil did it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.” I pushed the earbuds back into my ears and settled back to my C-shape, closing my eyes. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of fighting back.

  Just as the bus turned into the Garvin driveway, I felt another shove against my shoulder, only this time there was a mighty yank on the cord of my earbuds and they were ripped out of my ears so hard the whole MP3 player flew out of my hand and skittered across the bus floor, settling under the seat ahead of mine. I picked it up. The green light on the side of it had blinked off and the screen was blank. I flipped the switch to turn it off and then on again, but… nothing. It was dead.

  “God! What is your problem?” I asked, my voice getting loud.

  Again, Ellen was snickering her man face off, and so were a couple other cronies sitting behind them. And again Christy was giving me this fake wide-eyed look.

  The bus doors opened and we all stood up. That’s some sort of kid instinct, I think. You could be in the middle of just about anything and if the bus doors opened, you stood up. It was one of the constants of life. You are born, you die, you stand up when the bus doors open.

  Christy and I stood up within inches of each other. I could smell pancake syrup on her. She sneered at me, giving me a slow top-to-bottom look.

  “In a hurry to get to a funeral? Maybe dump Nick for a nice cold corpse? Oh wait. Nick is a corpse.”

  I held eye contact with her, refusing to back down. After all these years she still hadn’t tired of the same old stupid jokes. Still hadn’t grown out of them. Mom had told me once that if I kept ignoring Christy, eventually it would get boring for her. But on days like today, ignoring her was easier said than done. I was so over this rivalry thing, but no way was I going to let her get away with breaking my stuff.

  I pushed past her into the aisle, which had started moving. “Whatever your problem is…” I said. I held up my MP3 player. “You’re going to pay for this.”

  “Oooh, I’m shaking in my boots,” she said.

  Someone else added, “She might cast a spell on you, Christy,” and they all laughed.

  I moved down the aisle and stepped down onto the sidewalk, cut behind the bus and jogged to the bleachers where Stacey, Duce, and David were hanging out as usual.

  I climbed up to meet them, out of breath and furious.

  “Hey,” Stacey said. “What’s up? You look pissed.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Look what that bitch Christy Bruter did to my MP3 player.”

  “Oh, man,” David said, taking it out of my hands. He pushed a few buttons, tried to switch it on and off a few times. “You could get it fixed or something.”

  “I don’t want to get it fixed,” I said. “I want to kill her. God, I could just rip her stupid head off. She’ll regret this. I’m totally going to get her back for this.”
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  “Just blow her off,” Stacey said. “She’s such a cow. Nobody actually likes her.”

  A black Camaro roared into the parking lot and rolled up next to the football field. I recognized the car as Jeremy’s and my heart sped up. For a second I forgot about the MP3 player.

  The passenger side door opened and Nick stepped out. He had on the heavy black jacket he’d been wearing lately, and it was zipped up to his chin against the cool wind.

  I skipped up to the top of the bleachers and yelled out to him.

  “Nick!” I called, waving.

  He caught my motion, tipped his chin upward slightly, and shifted his course in my direction. He moved slowly, methodically toward me. I bounded down the bleachers and across the lawn to him.

  “Hey, baby!” I said, reaching him and wrapping myself around him. He sort of dodged me, but leaned down and kissed me, then turned me and slung his arm across my shoulders just like always. It felt so good to be under his arm again.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’re you losers doing?” He used his free hand to do some sort of handshake thing with Duce and then socked David in the shoulder.

  “Where you been?” David asked.

  Nick smirked and I was struck by how odd he looked. Vibrant, almost buzzing or something.

  “Been busy,” was Nick’s only reply. His eyes swept the front of the school. “Been busy,” he repeated, but he said it so quietly I’m pretty sure I was the only one to hear him. Not that he was really talking to any of us. I could’ve sworn he was talking to the school itself. The building, the ant-like activity inside of it.

  Mr. Angerson scuffed up behind us then and used his “principal voice,” the one we liked to imitate at parties: No, Garvin students, beer is bad for your growing brains. You must eat a healthy breakfast before coming to school, Garvin students. And remember, Garvin students, just say no to drugs.